A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Anything that encourages people to pick up an instrument and play, I’m fully behind.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

I feel that there are a few things in the world without cultural barriers.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

I never admire another’s fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

It’s a funny old world.